The Art of Observation and Why Genius Lies in the Selection of What Is Worth Observing. “In the field of observation,” legendary disease prevention pioneer Louis Pasteur famously proclaimed in 1854, “chance favors only the prepared mind.” “Knowledge comes from noticing resemblances and recurrences in the events that happen around us,” neuroscience godfather Wilfred Trotter asserted. That keen observation is what transmutes information into knowledge is indisputable — look no further than Sherlock Holmes and his exquisite mindfulness for a proof — but how, exactly, does one cultivate that critical faculty? From The Art of Scientific Investigation (public library; public domain) by Cambridge University animal pathology professor W. I. B. Though a number of celebrated minds favored intuition over rationality, and even Beveridge himself extolled the merits of the intuitive in science, he sides with modern-day admonitions about our tendency to mislabel other cognitive processes as “intuition” and advises:
Presence by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers - Book - eBook. Presence is an intimate look at the development of a new theory about change and learning. In wide-ranging conversations held over a year and a half, organizational learning pioneers Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers explored the nature of transformational change—how it arises, and the fresh possibilities it offers a world dangerously out of balance.
The book introduces the idea of “presence”—a concept borrowed from the natural world that the whole is entirely present in any of its parts—to the worlds of business, education, government, and leadership. Too often, the authors found, we remain stuck in old patterns of seeing and acting. By encouraging deeper levels of learning, we create an awareness of the larger whole, leading to actions that can help to shape its evolution and our future.
The Requiem Scenario November 2000 T he four of us were sitting in a circle in the study of Otto’s home on Maple Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Not quite.”
The Curse of Meh: Why Being Extraordinary Is Not a Matter of Being Universally Liked but of Being Polarizing. By Maria Popova After spending the entirety of my adult life as a noncitizen immigrant in America, perpetually toiling at the mercy of various visas, I am currently applying for something known as an “extraordinary ability green card” — a document granted to people whose contributions to culture the government deems valuable enough to offer them a slice of the American Dream or, at the very least, to make their lives a little easier by letting them stay in the country and continue to make said contributions with a little more dignity and peace of mind. “Currently,” of course, is a relative term in any government system — it has been more than two years since I got on this hamster wheel of violent and violating bureaucracy.
In the meantime, I have grown intimately familiar with the phrase itself — extraordinary ability. Any phrase turned over and over in one’s mind eventually becomes a sort of semantic puree vacant of meaning, almost nonsensical. But this is where it gets interesting. An Ecology Of Mind - The Gregory Bateson Documentary. When we reflect on how environmental education can be innovated to meet the needs and challenges of today’s world, and if we also consider the role that the arts can play in this, we are well-advised to take a closer look at the groundbreaking work of the great thinker Gregory Bateson.
The year 2010 saw the release of a highly interesting documentary on his work, entitled An Ecology of Mind. Completed more than thirty years after his death, filmmaker Nora Bateson (Gregory Bateson’s youngest daughter) directed a compelling hour-long introduction to the world of this thinking. Gregory Bateson was one of the most original thinkers of the late twentieth century. His research covered a vast array of different fields: anthropology, biology, psychology, and philosophy of science.
He would often move himself across the boundaries of disciplines, and do so in highly innovative ways. Until now his work has been largely inaccessible to those outside of the academic community. The Mystery of Holding - Matt Licata, PhD. The Surprising Source of Great Results: Attention and Mindfulness. According to Otto Scharmer, the quality of our attention shapes the quality of our results. A rather unusual thought in our Western management world. How does it work? While Scharmer shows a very practical and viable path to enhance the attentional quality of people in an organization in his Theory U, I want to explore possible mechanisms from a psychological perspective in this blog post and look at available empirical evidence.
Otto Scharmer’s Causal Chain In a recent paper, Otto Scharmer describes that despite of the many books available on management and leadership, there is still a dimension we know very little about: “The blind spot in current leader’s thought is that they know all about what leaders do and how they do it – but not know about the source level, that is, the inner place or state of awareness from which leaders and social systems operate.” Otto Scharmer then lays out the following causal chain: Individual Level: Mindfulness Practice Enhances Social Competence. [Management.com.ua] Presencing: Learning From the Future As It Emerges (On the Tacit Dimension of Leading Revolutionary Change) Presencing: Learning From the Future As It Emerges Abstract This paper looks at the impact of the emerging new business environments — often referred to as the "new economy" — on the basic concepts of organizational learning and change.
While organizational learning related activities during the 1990s were largely focused on the incremental improvement of already existing processes, most leadership teams are now facing a new set of business challenges that can rarely be successfully addressed with the traditional methods and concepts of organizational learning. Classical methods and concepts of organizational learning are all variations of the same Kolb (1984) based learning cycle: learning based on reflecting on the experiences of the past.
However, several currently significant leadership challenges cannot be successfully approached this way because the experience base of a team often is not relevant for the issue at hand. Introduction: Facing The New Leadership Challenge I. 1 Dr. Helping Young Children Sleep. Most children struggle at some time or another with sleeping through the night. Of course, when infants are quite young, they need to wake several times in the night, eat, and be reassured that their parents are close and all is well in their world. The need for reassurance, in addition to nourishment, is even stronger if a baby has had difficult times in his life already.
I won’t discuss helping infants with feelings that may stem from early life struggles in this article. I’ll focus on helping young children sleep who are healthy, at least six-months of age and older, with the pattern of interrupted sleep that sometimes appears. Babies vary greatly in their feeding needs and how much sleep they thrive on, but somewhere between six months and a year, most parents can hope for a good seven-hour stretch of sleep without waking.
Sleep Patty Wipfler talks about helping children sleep. Children need us to respond to them when they wake in the night Working on sleep brings a great day at school. Science shows what meditation really does to your brain | Wellbeing. Meditation has been used for centuries as a universal way to lower levels of anxiety, improve quality of life and tap into the all important benefits of mindfulness. We are all well aware of the various benefits of meditation to your overall wellbeing and positivity, but up until this point, the physiological benefits remained less clear. Why exactly did meditation work so well to calm our nerves and make us feel at ease? How could slow breathing and mindfulness do so much to change our outlook? Those questions are ones that researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital wanted to know the answers to as well.
“We found several brain regions that had changed,” Sara Lazar, an associate research scientist told Mic. The changes that scientists first noticed were visible in the posterior cingulate cortex, the area responsible for one’s ability to focus on a task, as well as, the left hippocampus which aids in learning, cognition and memory. How Repetition Enchants the Brain and the Psychology of Why We Love It in Music. 8 Things I Say Most Often To My Therapy Clients - mindbodygreen.com. I've been working with clients for 46 years, so of course, there are things I say over and over — even to the same person and even in the same session!
That's because there are certain things we each need to pay attention to, over and over. The process that I use is called Inner Bonding, which teaches people how to love themselves. As loving themselves becomes a way of life, their anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, anger, fear, addictions and relationships gradually heal. Here's what I say most often to my clients: 1. Breathe. I encourage my clients to breathe into their body, following their breath, using breath to help get present in their body, with their feelings. 2. When we haven't learned how to take responsibility for our feelings, then we avoid them in four major ways — all which are self-rejecting: We judge ourselves harshly, causing shame. And if we haven't taken responsibility for our feelings, then we can't start to manage them. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com.
Mindfulness. Neuroscience.